James and Moore: Two Perspectives on Truth

James and Moore: Two Perspectives on Truth RICHARD A. HERTZ WILLIAM JAMES FREQUENTLY MAINTAINEDthat no one understood his theory of truth; worse, that no one even gave him a chance. It appeared to him that other philosophers almost deliberately misread his writings on truth and distorted them in a ridiculous and highly naive way. On the other hand, one of James' most prominent critics, G. E. Moore, was aware of James' protestations on this count, and Moore just as consistently maintained that he had no choice but to read into James the seemingly "silly" notions he did. He noted that "because a philosopher would admit a view to be silly, when it is definitely put before him," it by no means follows "he has not himself been constantly holding and implying that very view. He may quite sincerely protest that he never has either held or implied it, and yet he may all the time have been not only implying it but holding it-vaguely , perhaps, but really." 1 Sixty years have gone by since James presented his theory of truth and Moore criticized it; enough time has passed so that the emotions surrounding Pragmatist doctrines should be dissipated and that cooler intellects should be able to judge the merits of the controversy dispassionately. In this paper, I shall assess Moore's criticisms of James, and in so doing I shall point out that Moore and James often argue at cross-purposes in so far as each views truth from a fundamentally different point of view: that of a God and that of man. I shall do this not merely to air out an old controversy but also to suggest that James put his finger on a number of very important points in his discussion of truth. Before meeting Moore's criticisms head-on, it will be necessary to make clear some of the more subtle aspects of James' theory; all of these subtleties are to be found in the paper Moore was criticizing, the famous one entitled "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth;" 2 most of them were ignored, however, both by Moore and by practically everyone else, in favor of the formula, "the truth is what works." First, it is not true that James is re-defining the notion of truth, as is so often supposed. G. E. Moore, "Professor James' 'Pragmatism'," Proceedings o] the Aristotelian Society, 1907-1908, 49-50. 2 William James, "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," in Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York, 1907. [2131 214 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Truth, as any dictionary will tell you. is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their "agreement," as falsity means their disagreement, with "reality." Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term "agreement," and what by the term "reality," when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with. 3 James accepts the "common" definition of truth, but he would like to form a more precise notion of what the definition boils down to; in this case, what "agreement" of ideas with reality is to indicate with respect to our day-to-day action. Second, we must be clear that for James the world or reality simply is; beliefs or ideas are true of the world. Hence, truth enters the picture only when beliefs and human beings enter the picture, though James is willing to talk of truths existing prior to any human beings in the sense that certain ideas were then verifiable, while not verified. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely . The "facts" themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.4 In a later essay James is even more explicit; "'Realities are not true, they are; and beliefs are true of them." 5 Third, what does James mean by ideas agreeing with reality...